Shuttle Endeavour flies safely into orbit

Space shuttle Endeavour streaked into the heavens Monday morning, making its final flight into space and delivering a key piece of scientific equipment to the International Space Station.

Shortly before liftoff Endeavour’s commander Mark Kelly, whose wife Gabrielle Giffords watched the launch at Kennedy Space Center, said the flight represented the best of America and humanity.

“It is in the DNA of our great country to reach for the stars and explore,” Kelly said. “We must not stop.”

With Endeavour’s launch NASA has only the orbiter Atlantis to fly before it ends the space shuttle program this summer. After that, the space agency has no rocket and capsule ready to take the shuttle’s place.

Monday’s launch went off with few hitches after being grounded for nearly a month by an issue with an on-board heater that malfunctioned during a launch attempt three weeks ago.

On Monday the heater posed no difficultites and the only other minor hitch was a shuttle tile that needed to be repaired on the pad.

The shuttle’s primary payload is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a cutting-edge experiment to detect some of the universe’s most exotic particles.

The AMS has a large magnet and eight different detectors to measure the charge and energy of particles, which will pass through the machine within a few billionths of a second. It is a highly complex device, with more than 300,000 cables and data channels.

Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, the AMS won’t be fixable once launched into space, so scientists have to get it right. Every electronics system has at least three back-ups.

The astronauts ferrying the instrument to the space station, where it will be attached and which will provide power to the 15,000-pound AMS, are eager to safely install it on the fourth day of the flight, Thursday.

With the new instrument installed on the station, physicists are hoping to find answers to basic questions like why there’s very little antimatter in the universe, when at one point there was probably equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and what exactly dark matter is.

22 Responses

I was a college freshman when the first shuttle launched; now I’m a middle aged dude taking cholesterol meds. It is stunningly pathetic that soon we will have no way to get people into Earth orbit, let alone to the moon and Mars. Very sad and a sign of American decline.

It is stunningly pathetic that soon we will have no way to get people into Earth orbit, let alone to the moon and Mars.

Obviously you have forgotten that we will have a way to do so; we’ll buy the seats, like good capitalists. And the cost will be lower than it would be to send someone up on the Shuttle (unless, of course, we had gone with the passenger version).

Ok, I hate to sound like a naive little kid here, but I’ll ask this anyway. Is there even a remote possibility that a future president can reinstate the shuttle and “take back” the existing shuttles that have already been given to museums, etc so that they can continue to be used until we develop a new type of vehicle?

Is there even a remote possibility that a future president can reinstate the shuttle and “take back” the existing shuttles that have already been given to museums, etc so that they can continue to be used until we develop a new type of vehicle?

Sure. All it would take is a lot of money and a willingness to ignore common law. A rough estimate would be that it would cost about three times as much as Constellation to take back the shuttles and refit them, and it would take about five years to do so if we included all of the necessary safety precautions and if none of the museums objected to having their bought-and-paid-for shuttles stolen by the government.

Or we could just wait until 2013 and let the various COTS companies get their shuttle replacements man-rated and use them for less than the Soyuz (and much, much less than either the Shuttle or Constellation).

It’s not true that we have “no way” to get people in Earth orbit. We will continue to contract with the Russians to launch Expedition crews to the ISS, as we have for years now. The Shuttle was not the primary crew exchange vehicle for ISS operations.

With the retirement of the Shuttle program, we will not have an American-owned crew transport system. However, that will likely be resolved by the Commercial Crew Development program within the next few years. It is an outgrowth of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, widely considered the “backup” to the now-cancelled Constellation Program.

Too many of the production support lines have already been shut down, Mike G. Some of the suppliers aren’t even in business anymore. We started down this road over six years ago and there just isn’t any turning back now, not without spending a lot of money that NASA doesn’t have. Neither Congress, nor the Bush Administration, nor the current Administration have shown any inclination to keep the Shuttle on standby.

Discovery is in the process of being detoxified and prepped for the museum, Endeavour is now on-orbit for its last flight, and Atlantis is getting ready for the final mission of the program – STS-135.

While the space program and sending humans into orbit and the moon has been fantasic and helped show the world that “freedom” trumphs totalitarianism, the opportunity cost of sending humans into orbit to do things that robots can do much more efficiently no longer makes sense.

We should allow the private sector to provided the space support for those industries that require it, and the tourist who are willing to pay the cost for the thrill of heaving themselves to the heavens…….

The real challenge of the future is the virtual world and how we will protect the concept “humanity” going forward…….spending tremdous resources on massive “throw weight” in the age of nanotechnology is like continuing to farm using plow horses……..its charming, but no one would expect to succeed in operating a farm with that technology today.

There is a divide between those that think our destiny and future safety requires us to expand beyond the planet and those that think we should only send robots or that the space program is only useful as a political tool for showing might. If you are in the former category then it is crystal clear the need for a vigorous manned space program.

Just how long after the last shuttle is decommisioned do you think it will be before the cost we are charged start climbing? Oh wait, that’s right they already upped the price!!

Yes, they did – and it is still much less expensive than flying the shuttle. Let’s check the facts. A seat on Soyuz now costs $56 million, which is a 10% increase over the previous cost or 4.9%/year (these are two-year contracts). The shuttle costs $1,500 million per flight and can lift six astronauts, which makes it $250 million per seat or five times more expensive than the Soyuz. With a 5% cost increase per year, that means that it would be 2044 before they reached the cost that we are paying now.

the worst part of this launch to me was a couple of minutes into the flight the communications were taken over by HOUSTON not NEW YORK from mission control. The space shuttle going to New York still ticks me off.

Great idea, because basic research has always been successful when it is run by people solely looking for profit. NOT. We don’t spend nearly as much on NASA as most think we do. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to many government programs even if you don’t include defense, medicaire/caid, or education. NASA, despite having the same problems that many big bureaucracies have, returns magnitudes above and beyond what is spent.

You, and Astronaut Kelly can all say wonderful Admiral James Tiberius Kirk things about “man must go to space” all you want, but, as long as you elect a probable Communist who has “better uses” for that money ( in the form of payoffs to his constituents, CERTAIN Labor Unions and Welfare Queens ) you will not go.
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You have a man-made mess here on earth to clean up before ANYONEe ever goes to space again. Start the cleanup in 2012.

JohnD, I hope you’re right about the private sector taking over. Seems weird to me though that we could go to the moon in 1969 (when I was 6 yrs old) and we can’t do it today, and I will probably be dead before the U.S. returns to the moon or goes to any other celestial body (though I’m sure the Chinese will get there soon).

Regarding the NASA budget; there’s a huge amount of bloat, and this is part of what I was talking about–the sad decline of America; government can’t do anything any more. But even with the waste, NASA’s budget for a year is the same amount that is spent on Social Security payments in 8 days, or the same amount that is spent in Iraq in about 6 months.

Seems weird to me though that we could go to the moon in 1969 (when I was 6 yrs old) and we can’t do it today,

We can go, we just don’t want to make the necessary payments.

and I will probably be dead before the U.S. returns to the moon or goes to any other celestial body (though I’m sure the Chinese will get there soon).

The Chinese are on record as saying that they’ll be there by 2020. Right now, they seem to be on schedule for doing so.

But even with the waste, NASA’s budget for a year is the same amount that is spent on Social Security payments in 8 days, or the same amount that is spent in Iraq in about 6 months.

Or the same amount that is spent on payments for our national debt in seventeen days. If we had paid off our debt over the past ten years, instead of doubling it, we could have paid for NASA twenty times over using the money that we saved.